Mainly on Wyatt's "The Flee from Me," as a poem of disillusion, wonder, and astonishing subtlety and depicting the psychology of love and disappointment. Here's the poem: They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been other...
Jan 19, 2012•41 min
This is the first class of a course on the close reading of poetry. It will consist, at least for the first half, of intense reading of poems for as long as is necessary, with no time pressure. It's not a course designed to get you reading a lot; it's designed to get you thinking a lot. We start out with some lullabies, first with Auden's Lullaby Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves ...
Jan 19, 2012•31 min
A somewhat giddily desultory last class, mainly on Samson, though with some attention to Paradise Regained and much about patience and heroic martyrdom. What being patient means. Milton's amazing prosody in Sonnet 16: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Compared to Jesus standing in PR 4. Some biographical account of Milton's blindness. Milton and the Book of Job. Reading Samson instead of seeing it. What happens to the boy who guides him? Is Dalila morally reproachable? Is Samson ultimat...
May 12, 2011•54 min
Considerations from Areopagitica for the understanding of Milton: knowing good only by means of evil. How you can only know one if you know the other. How then the double fall of Adam and Eve requires Adam to know evil (that Eve has fallen) before he's eaten the fruit because she has. After her fall, and before Adam's, humanity both has and hasn't eaten the fruit (they're one person as far as that goes), and so knows good and evil before knowing good and evil. Thus he is already ruined ("me with...
May 10, 2011•42 min
How it's only humans in the whole universe who thinks things through. And therefore who fall on behalf of those who think things through. They think silently, too, keep their thoughts from each other.
May 05, 2011•23 min
What kinds of judgments does God leave to us? Plot as typology: learning how to understand the climax. In Paradise Lost we learn to use our own judgment in deciding about God's. Faithfulness always a good. So when Adam judges that Eve is real and that he will stay with her, he is extending a test already given him by God, with respect to the creation of Eve. But this time God says he fails it. This lecture, alas, was cut off so the last ten minutes are missing (iPad fail). But this is essentiall...
May 03, 2011•25 min
Dreams in Milton: the way dream figures are always for us and therefore allegorical, and not for themselves. But in Milton this isn't true: the point is to discover the extent to which we're dreams (like Orpheus and Calliope) and the way that beings with the ephemerality and fragility of dreams -- us -- can nevertheless suffer. All by way of reading the Invocation to Book 7.
May 01, 2011•48 min
More on the quasi-invocation to Book IV, and about Miltonic ambiguity: two different ways of coming to the same end. Here either he or God could have produced the saving voice: it doesn't matter. But neither of them does, despite the fact that John of Patmos hears a voice from the future. Invocation and prayer are similar: the request is self-granting. But not in Book IV. We then consider Satan's use of necessity, the tyrant's plea, and compare it to God's.
Apr 19, 2011•51 min
We look at the quasi-invocation to Book IV and compare it to Raphael's failure to have such a warning voice for Adam and Even in Books 5 ff. What are the limits of his affability? This is a continuation of the question: who judges? and its answer: only humans. We broach the question then: fallen or unfallen humans? in parallel to the question: fallen or unfallen angels?
Apr 14, 2011•49 min
We consider the question who can be an adequate judge of God's ways, starting with the Invocation to Book 1, and then looking at the pusillanimity of the loyal angels in Book 3. We notice the way the Son manages God, but also that none of the other angels do. So it's not only the case that the rebel angels aren't able to judge God; the loyal angels aren't either. To be continued in the next class....
Apr 13, 2011•50 min
We finish up with the Invocation to Book III, and discuss Protestantism's (and particularly Milton's) view of Catholicism. Worshipping anything in the external world is worshipping an idol. Imagining that anything in the external world is magic, including the fruit of the tree of knowledge is idolatry. This means that knowledge of good and evil really does come out of a recognition of the fact that one has freely eaten of the tree: freedom and guilt are correlated. This also means that there's s...
Apr 11, 2011•28 min
We continue our consideration of the mind as its own place: the continuity between the lady and Satan. The relative unimportance of the outside world, therefore. We begin considering the Invocation to Book 3.
Apr 11, 2011•44 min
We consider freedom and fate in Paradise Lost, and the question of God vs. Satan; and talk about some of Milton's heresies, including his anti-Trinitarianism. NB: this recording ends abruptly half way through, because of a software glitch.
Apr 08, 2011•24 min
Comus vs. the lady. The moral asymmetry of rape: seduction is better with respect to the victim but worse with respect to devotion to abstract moral principle, because rape (as the Lady says) does not touch her mind, whereas seduction would. And yet rape is clearly a far worse crime than seduction, because it enslaves and does violence to the victim as seduction doesn't. So the moral quality of Comus is ambiguous as long as he remains a seducer. When he becomes a would-be rapist, he is clearly e...
Apr 08, 2011•50 min
We conclude our discussion of Lycidas, by considering the austerity of its ending: the image of a world of absence in which all the false surmise that precedes it is gone. Then on to Comus, the subject of this and the next class.
Apr 04, 2011•43 min
We take a detour through a general account of how debate works in Milton - the way he presents both sides and his essentially dramatic structure, derived as much from Plato as from Shakespeare, and the way he thinks about the moral status of a dramatic structure, where each side seeks to convert the other. The various speakers in Lycidas, the happy fall in Paradise Lost: all are about seeing different routes to morality, including exposure to evil argument (as in Aeropagitica). Comedy vs. traged...
Mar 31, 2011•52 min
We begin discussing Milton by starting out on Lycidas, and the nature of pastoral and pastoral elegy, as a segue from Book VI of The Faerie Queene . Lycidas as a poem in which Milton demonstrates his own power.
Mar 30, 2011•47 min
Last and I think BEST class on the Faerie Queene: scopophilia and narraive. Colin Clout and the Graces are present to the hidden Calidore, as Amoret has been present to Britomart in the house of Busirane. Voyeurism: they're present to us but we're not present to them. Kleinian reading of this scenario. Paradoxes of fiction and fictional interest. They'll reappear in Milton as well. Tomorrow: Lycidas!
Mar 27, 2011•47 min
Book Vi as pastoral. Native courtesy. Class distinction. Courtesy innate, but if it's innate it seems to indicate high class origins. Paradoxes of courtesy. Calidore and Colin Clout.
Mar 25, 2011•37 min
We continue considering the relation of difference and variety to uniformity, under the aspects of both justice and courtesy in Books V and VI. How can variety coexist with courtesy. A card trick (and much embarrassed silence) shows how the random can sync with the coordinated: the lesson of the Mutabilitie Cantos too.
Mar 21, 2011•51 min
The relation of justice to courtesy. The openmindedness of the latter. Beheadings everywhere. Arthegall vs. the leveling gyant, part I.
Mar 17, 2011•39 min
Adjudication in Book 5: Retributive vs. distributive justice. Some background on English-Irish strife. Revenge as wild justice. Can justice come into play between nations?
Mar 15, 2011•41 min
Scudamor at the Temple of Venus. Jealousy and friendship. Love and hate. The relation of all to the idea of justice, broached in Book 5
Mar 14, 2011•47 min
The Aristotlean idea of friendship: the friend as second self. The nature of this combined subjectivity. Its relation to love, and jealousy. Siblings. Marriage. Weddings.
Mar 10, 2011•43 min
The spectrum of virtues from private to social. Similarities and differences between love and friendship. Their relation to jealousy.
Mar 09, 2011•48 min
The philosophical relation of matter to form in the Garden of Adonis. The strange reversal in Spenser, whereby matter is eternal, but forms decay. What this has to do with poetry. Time the troubled. Jealousy vs. chastity.
Mar 08, 2011•48 min
Living in the land of Faery, vs. living in reality, and vs. living in the world of Platonic forms. The proem to Book 6. The Garden of Adonis and what it was like to live there once -- the Wordsworthian strain in Spenser. Knowing what it was like "by tryall." Literary need: the creation and establishment of that kind of need.
Mar 04, 2011•49 min
Allegory for whom? Why the house of Busirane? Whom is it for? Britomart? Amoret? Scudamor? How does the House of Busirane work in each of these three cases?
Mar 03, 2011•41 min
Allegory and human individuality. What it means to turn people into allegories. A version of road rage. Temporal fouls ups as Britomart wounds Marinell after she sees Florimel racing to aid the already-wounded Marinel. What Britomart's wound means. Her pleasure in her distress. Seeing and wounding. Adonis.
Mar 01, 2011•49 min
Plot vs. allegory in Britomart. Allegory in the service of plot. Allegories about the primacy of plot, of human character to symbolization.
Feb 27, 2011•51 min
